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Gloss

How do cells perceive their environment and produce appropriate responses? The
sensing and coordination of proper responses is coordinated by intricate
biochemical networks that integrate signals and compute biological responses
with high fidelity and reproducibility. Modern “omics”
(proteomics, genomics, lipidomics, and metabolomics) techniques have identified
many of the components of these networks, but researchers are now faced with the
challenge of unraveling how the components are connected and how they compute.
To elucidate these network properties, various mathematical and computational
modeling techniques are used because their complexity defeats human intuition.
The results indicate that signaling networks show a wide diversity of behaviors
encoded in their design, but that they are also very flexible, with cells
adapting their networks in response to different contexts by changing
connectivities. The remaining challenges include integration of data generated
with methods for the analysis of different types of networks (gene regulation,
protein modification, and metabolic networks), and generation of coherent
network interpretations that are widely accessible and can generate new
hypotheses that are experimentally testable and that will push the knowledge
frontier in biology and biomedicine.